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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25705666">Eye of the Storm</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopTalkingAtMe/pseuds/StopTalkingAtMe'>StopTalkingAtMe</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>War of the Worlds (2005 Spielberg)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Character Study, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Guilt, Implications of canon, Mild Sexual Content, Nightmares, Post-Canon</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 09:02:11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>4,398</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25705666</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopTalkingAtMe/pseuds/StopTalkingAtMe</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>When Ray left Boston he hadn’t thought of it as running away. But it was, of course.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Ray Ferrier/Original Female Character</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>7</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Limited Theatrical Release 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Eye of the Storm</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplecoffee/gifts">simplecoffee</a>.</li>



    </ul></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The day of the fight there’d been a storm gathering for a while. The air was close and humid, and it felt like the end was coming and this time it’d be for real. The mood in the camp was always kind of weird just before a storm: the tension worked on people’s nerves, tempers frayed, fights broke out, and even the ones who pretended like everything would go back to normal given time went quiet, and the more they insisted nothing was wrong the less it sounded like they believed it.</p><p>Ray was working a double shift and it was too damn hot, the sweat pooling in the small of his back, and he was distracted, couldn’t seem to stop himself from watching the gathering storm clouds, searching for anything that didn’t look right.</p><p>They’d dug up a couple of bodies buried under the rubble, and so work had had to halt until they could be dealt with, the red weed that had wrapped itself around them removed and incinerated. And even then they couldn’t get back to work because the rest of it had to be dug up, and that shit rooted deep, brittle tendrils finer than human hairs burrowing their way down into the earth.</p><p>The word was when you got deep enough it wasn’t all dead, but so far all he’d found crumbled to powder in his clumsy gloved hands. They’d burned as much of it as they could, and the smoke lingered on his clothes. It would do for days, tainting everything with the acrid smell of scorched metal. Making Ray dream of cloud-bursts of blood, warm as summer rain.</p><p>It got him thinking about things he didn’t want to be thinking about. Like the future that was waiting for them, and whether there were any arable fields left that hadn’t been given over to the weed and fertilised with human blood. He guessed not, which meant any crops they planted would be fertilised with it in turn, just like anything they built on the foundations of the ruined cities would be built on, and from, the ashes of the dead.</p><p>Not the way he wanted his thoughts to be going.</p><p>He tried calling Mary Ann and the kids – because the last time they’d spoken he’d promised he’d try harder to keep in touch – but the lines were out again. He’d have been lying if he’d claimed it didn’t come as a relief, even if the last time they'd spoken it sounded like Rachel and Robbie were starting to rebuild their relationship.</p><p>He was tired to the bone, and usually it would have been a good thing: the sort of tiredness that, combined with a beer and a hot meal, would usually have guaranteed an undisturbed night’s sleep, but there was a storm coming and since he knew he wasn’t going to be able to sleep tonight he went in search of company instead. Which was how Claire, who looked pretty much as crappy as he felt, came to tell him about the man who’d been injured in a fight after an argument had gotten out of control.</p><p>Ray didn’t know the guy, had in fact taken pains not to know the guy, but he’d seen him around camp, flat eyes and a broken down look, fingers that never stopped moving like he’d forgotten how to stay still. He’d forgotten how to keep his mouth shut too, talking even when no one was listening, or when they were and he should really, really shut the fuck up for the good of his health. <em>It wasn’t over, they’d be back, a civilisation like that was too advanced to fall at the first hurdle.</em> That kind of shit. The kind of shit that no one wanted to hear. It was from his lips that Ray first heard the word ‘Martian’ uttered with the utmost sincerity. The guy reminded him of Harlan.</p><p>It should have sounded crazy, but it didn’t. Crazy was the long-buried tripods stalking across the countryside, rising out of the water like leviathans from the depths. Crazy was aliens streaking down from the heavens on fucking lightning bolts. If it was crazy, then it was the contagious kind, and it didn’t matter that you stopped your ears and tried not to listen: it got into your head anyways, seeped in there like poison, and once it was inside you you couldn’t get it out again.</p><p>Not that it mattered: it was already too late.</p><p> </p><p>* * *</p><p> </p><p>When he’d left Boston he hadn’t thought of it as running away. It wasn’t like he had a shortage of reasons to leave, not least because he was starting to get sick of everyone telling how welcome he was and how <em>of course</em> he could stay as long as he wanted.</p><p>Except for the kids, none of them got it.</p><p>There were times when he wanted to scream at them that they didn’t know what it was like, that they didn’t have the first fucking clue how lucky they’d been. And honestly, he was getting a little sick of swallowing down his resentment at the unspoken question that, sure, he was welcome, of course he was, hadn’t they told him so repeatedly, but when the fuck was he going to leave?</p><p>Usually when it was him, rather than Rachel, who’d just woken the whole house screaming, because he’d found Harlan waiting for him in the red-soaked rafters, his skull staved in and his teeth splintered in the ruin of his mouth, and, hey, turned out it <em>was </em>his blood after all, who knew?</p><p>Of all the things Ray could have gone his whole life without knowing it was the amount of blood a human body contained, and that it was enough to drown in.</p><p>Once, when Ray couldn’t sleep, Tim had wandered downstairs and somehow managed to make offering Ray a beer sound like the least natural thing in the world ever, and then, even more painfully, after Ray accepted, had settled down on the edge of the table, cleared his throat, and finally ventured with a reticence that made Ray think Mary Ann had put him up to it, “Hey, look, man, uh, if you ever need to talk...”</p><p>“’Then don’t come to you?’”</p><p>Tim shot him a wary look, then flushed with a kind of relief when he saw Ray was joking. “Yeah,” he said, smiling. Then the smile slipped. “I’m serious though, we… I can’t even imagine what you must have gone through.”</p><p>“That’s right, you can’t.” Ray swigged the beer, and managed – just – to produce something that was closer to a smile than a grimace to show he had no hard feelings, but which still sent the message: <em>seriously, stop pushing. </em>Tim had the grace to take note. He stopped pushing. And Ray felt like he could almost breathe again.</p><p>It was the images of Brooklyn that changed everything. Before the first news reports started to filter through, they’d been settling into their old familiar patterns, Mary Ann looking at him the way she used to, like he was the third kid she’d never asked for. Long-suffering, but also a little vindicated, because she’d known he was going to let her down. The kind of look that always made Ray want to fuck up deliberately from the start if she was so certain it was going to happen. He’d be doing her a favour: nothing Mary Ann loved better than being proved right.</p><p>That stopped after they saw what had become of New York, how it looked kind of like the surface of the moon, the blistered hulks of tripods lying abandoned amongst the wreckage, and everything covered in a layer of ash. It hadn’t been so easy for them to lie to themselves after that, and he’d seen it in Mary Ann’s eyes, the moment her faith in The Way Things Were became unmoored: she was the one who’d all but abandoned her kids and <em>he</em> was the one who’d come through.</p><p>She’d pulled Rachel close, and stared at Ray over her daughter’s head, clinging too tight. She only relented and eased her grip after Tim had repeatedly told her she was scaring Rachel. Her mouth opened like she wanted to speak, but no words came out, but he could see the question in her eyes: <em>How did hell did you survive?</em></p><p>He was glad she didn’t ask. He didn’t know what answer he could have given her, unless it was just that he got lucky, or that he’d hustled a little harder than the next guy, the same thing he’d been doing mostly all his life. That in the end it had come down to nothing but luck, selfishness, and a deep-running seam of ruthlessness he hadn’t realised was there until he needed to tap it. He didn’t much like knowing that about himself.</p><p>And he was sick of feeling like a goddamn charity case, sick of the arguments between Mary Ann and Robbie, Mary Ann wanting Robbie to stay in school and Robbie wanting to do something tangible in his life and join the Red Cross or whatever, and both of them trying to drag him into it, trying to get him to take sides. Sick of seeing what had become of the closeness between Robbie and his little sister, how she barely even looked at him any more, because as far as she was concerned he’d deserted her when she needed him most. And how sometimes when she had nightmares, Ray was pretty sure the monster she was dreaming about was him.</p><p>It wasn’t running away. He didn’t think of it that way. Not when the kids should never have been with him in the first place. It was about knowing when was the right time to step back, to be able to recognise the strained atmosphere when a house was too full with bodies, and it had been all too obvious which of those people was the one who didn’t belong.</p><p>He was the one with blood on his hands, after all.</p><p> </p><p>* * *</p><p> </p><p>When he left he didn’t know where he was heading or what he was going to do next. He’d muttered something about heading home to Brooklyn, but in the end he wasn’t heading anywhere, just driving on auto-pilot with no destination in sight. Quiet roads, back roads, away from the traffic because other cars set his nerves on edge, and it was on one of those quiet roads that he saw it: a downed tripod, a mound of scorched metal lying on a circle of blackened earth the size of a football pitch.</p><p>He’d slowed and stopped and was out of the car before he realised he was going to do it. Stumbling down the slope, the first raindrops stinging his unturned face. A crick in his neck because the fucking thing was huge, as big as a building, a vast blackened mound of greasy-looking metal.</p><p>He’d lost track of how long he was standing there before he realised he wasn’t alone.</p><p>There was another figure, so dwarfed by the tripod he hadn’t noticed her at first. A woman, huddled in an ill-fitting man’s coat, and as oblivious to his presence as he’d been to hers. There was a hiking rucksack slung on the ground. No car in sight, and her face wore a look of shock and exhaustion, the same look he’d kept seeing in the mirror until he stopped looking.</p><p>“Hey!” he called out to her. “You okay?”</p><p>She turned her head at his words, but he wasn’t sure she’d heard him. He gestured to the car. “Need a ride?”</p><p>She stared at him warily, then shook her head and turned back to the tripod. Ray waited, the rain intensifying, then gave up and got back in the car, more to escape the smell of charcoal rising up from the damp earth than anything else.</p><p>It wasn’t any kind of escape at all.</p><p>When the car door closed, it felt like his breathing had been cut off as well, and he was back there, crushed in with the others in the cage, waiting to be bled. The raindrops formed labyrinthine patterns on the glass, words scrawled in a language he couldn’t read. His breathing grew rough, irritating the ache in his throat. A feeling struck him, one he couldn’t seem to shake: that there was someone in the car with him, sitting right there behind him on the back seat, and because he couldn’t stand it he thought instead about the people who might have been trapped inside the tripod, and whether they were still there, whether they’d died instantly when the tripod fell, or if they’d lived just long enough to suffocate or burn to death, and then he was out of the car, moving without conscious thought, half-blinded by the pelting rain.</p><p>The woman reacted, scrambling to her feet, but he barely noticed her. Nor did he notice the gun which she’d fumbled out of the pocket of her coat. She said something to him as he hurried past her, but it didn’t register, and when he asked her afterwards what she’d said she claimed she couldn’t remember.</p><p>He dropped to his knees at the foot of the tripod, running his hands over the metal, searching for a way in. Expecting to feel it shift and shudder and take a breath beneath his hands. Expecting to the swallowed up in a fire burst of searing light. Ignoring the revulsion squirming up his spine at how wrong it felt. It seemed like it should have been warm against the skin, like something alive and still slumbering. The metal was textured like brushed chrome.</p><p>He was thinking of Rachel as he scrambled up over the top of the fucking thing, searching for a hatch he could lever open. The rain made the metal slick and slippery, and he couldn’t find purchase, swearing under his breath as he lost his grip and slipped down again. There was no way in, not that he could find, but there had to be and he kept clawing at the metal, trying to remember what had happened the last time he’d seen one of these fucking things, how it had pulled him inside itself, breaking off from time to time to scrub at his wet hair with his hands as he tried to remember, tried to make himself remember, until he was weeping openly, because if he could just have saved one of them then maybe things would be okay, but yet again he couldn’t save anyone.</p><p>And then she was there, wrapping her arms around him, and he was enveloped in the wet-dog-and-wood-smoke smell of her coat, and she was rocking him like he was a kid again, her hand on the back of his head, while he tried to pull away, telling her she didn’t understand, she didn’t get it, the words ringing out loud enough to bring him to his senses. <em>T</em><em>here are people in there</em>.</p><p> </p><p>* * *</p><p> </p><p>He’d been dreaming of that tripod. Of hunting through it for the corpses. The first ones he’d had to deal with. And they’d been dead, of course they had, probably since the tripod had come down, but if he couldn’t save them, then the least he could do was bury them. In the dream he’d been trapped in a switchback, his jeans snagging on a snarl of twisted metal that caught and held him fast, and deep in the machine, he’d heard a hollow banging like the thud of a heartbeat and he knew the giant was waking up.</p><p>He woke with a jolt to a slash of soundless thunder. Waited so long for the accompanying thunder bolt that he was already reaching for Claire’s arm and shaking her awake by the time the accompanying peal of thunder rolled out, slow and lazy. The storm was just a way away still, and he let out his breath, gripped by intense relief.</p><p>“What is it?” she murmured, her voice slurred with sleep and panic.</p><p>“Nothing. It’s nothing,”</p><p>She groaned and dropped back down, covering her eyes. Rain drilled against the windows. “Go back to sleep,” she murmured up at the ceiling, her eyes closed, and he couldn’t tell who she was talking to, to him or to herself.</p><p>Whichever it was, it was advice he should have taken, but another flash of light illuminated the room, and he knew there was no way in hell he was ever going to be able to get back to sleep. He slipped out from under the covers and paced restlessly to the kitchen. Outside the wind and the rain were picking up. The camp was in darkness, but when he opened the fridge the light didn’t come on, so the electrics were out yet again, but the beer was still cold, so he took one and leaned against the kitchen table to wait out the storm.</p><p>Probably a bad idea. He should have stayed in bed. Instead he was thinking of his kids and whether the storm had passed over Boston too. Whether Rachel was lying awake, unable to sleep, trying not to cry. Maybe she'd crept into her mom’s bed, the way she used to when she was little. Robbie’d used to do the same thing. Were they listening out for the thunder and counting the too-long seconds, thinking of everything that might still lie buried deep in the ground? That there was nothing left was the official word, but they probably would have said that no matter the answer. Did they even know how to go about looking?</p><p>It was just a storm. Nothing was going to come searing out of the sky, riding a lightning bolt. It was over.</p><p>“Ray?” Claire stood in the doorway, blanket around her shoulders. “Coming to bed?”</p><p>“Soon.”</p><p>“It’s just a storm,” she said, although from the way her arms tightened around herself, he guessed she wasn’t sure she could believe it either.</p><p>“Yeah,” he said, his voice flat and uneven at the same time, and even as he said it he was thinking, <em>But what if it’s not?</em></p><p>She came over and sat on the table next to him, leaning close, her arm around his back, her head on his shoulder. Clinging onto him, steadying both of them.</p><p>Another jagged streak of lightning, like the world splitting open, no sound but the rain.</p><p>She flinched, and he could feel her holding her breath until the thunder sounded.</p><p>And he thought: <em>What if this is it? What if this is the end?</em></p><p>“Can I tell you something?” he said. She shrugged, meaning ‘Yes’, and even so he didn’t know what he was going to say until he’d said it. “I killed a man.”</p><p>She went still, then shifted away a little, turning her head to stare at him. He wasn’t looking at her. “Who?”</p><p>Ray closed his eyes. “His name was Harlan Ogilvy.” And he began to tell her, slowly at first, stumbling over the details. It didn’t make much sense at first; it took him a while to sort through the details, piecing them together. Maybe not so surprising: it wasn’t just the first time he’d told anyone, but the first time he’d allowed himself to think about it in detail, and he had to backtrack to explain Robbie’s leaving them, and then again to explain what had happened on the ferry, and what it had been like, stuttering over the words in his desperation to get her to understand. He couldn’t bring himself to look at her, because if he did, then he was pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to keep talking, and he wanted to get this out, needed to. The weight of it was crushing his chest, choking off the words he was in such a hurry to get out.</p><p>How scared he’d been, how he hadn’t known what the hell he was doing or what he was going to do next, and how he’d barely been able to admit to himself he was pretty sure he’d just sent Robbie off to die because he hadn’t known how to stop him, and maybe there’d been a part of him that hadn’t wanted to stop him, and how Harlan had seemed like a goddamn guardian angel, offering a safe place, a moment to rest and regroup. Until he hadn’t, the crazy fucking bastard. Until Ray had realised Harlan wasn’t just on the brink of losing his mind but a couple of miles over it, and so Ray had killed him because he hadn’t known what else to do, and in the end it hadn’t even mattered, because they’d come for him and Rachel anyway.</p><p>Halfway through his voice cracked. Claire hesitated, then put her arm back around his back.</p><p>After he was finished, she was silent for a long time, but when he took a deep juddering breath, she shook herself and pulled him closer. “You were protecting your daughter,” she started to say, and he shook his head, impatient, because she wasn’t listening, she wasn’t getting it.</p><p>“I didn’t have to do it,” he said. “They would all have died anyway. All we had to do...” His voice broke and her hand found the back of his head, fingers burrowing down into his hair. His voice hardened and he forced out the words. “All we had to do was wait it out. I murdered him for nothing.”</p><p>“And there’s no way you could have known that,” she said, pressing her forehead to his, her hand gripping the nape of his neck. “You get that, right?”</p><p>He searched for words, couldn't find any.</p><p>She pulled back, meeting his gaze.</p><p>“If it was me,” she said, and there was a finality to her voice, like if these words weren’t carved in stone they should have been. “If it was my daughter…” She shook her head. “You did the right thing.”</p><p>Something knotted tight in his throat. </p><p>At another flash of lighting they both jumped. This time the thunder kicked in almost at once, and she gave a breathless laugh. “Is this what we’re going to be like from now on?” she said, her mouth twisting. “Every time there’s a storm?”</p><p>He brushed his thumb along her cheekbone, thankful for the interruption. “It’ll get easier,” he said, hoping it was true. “It’s too soon.”</p><p>She tilted her head up towards his and because he wasn't sure what else to do he kissed her, slipping down from the table and pressing between her legs. Until she pushed him away and caught hold of his hand, tugging him towards the bedroom, kissing him along the way. If it hadn’t been an unfamiliar house, with the faces of strangers smiling down from the walls, they might not have gotten all the way there, but he hadn’t got over the feeling of trespass. As it was, when they fell onto the bed, he was already half-inside her, his hands on her thighs, her legs wrapped around his waist.</p><p>By the time they’d finished, sweating and breathing hard, the covers lying in a tangle on the floor, the worst of the storm had passed over and the rain drumming softer at the window. Sleep still felt a long way off – he couldn’t shake the feeling that they’d come the moment he relaxed: they always had in the past – but the weight of her in his arms was a comfort, and she didn’t seem to feel much like sleeping either.</p><p>“You know,” he said, “you never told me anything about yourself.”</p><p>“You never asked.”</p><p>“You’re right, I didn’t.” They’d talked, sure, but before tonight it had only ever been about the shit that didn’t matter. The important stuff had always felt off-limits. He always figured if she wanted to share she would do, the same way he hasn’t shared half the shit he went through, but maybe because he hadn’t asked she’d assumed he didn’t care. “Should I have?”</p><p>She shook her head, her hand resting on his chest. “It’s one of the things I like about you. You’re...”</p><p>“Shallow? Selfish?” He half-smiled. “Now you’re starting to sound like my ex-wife.”</p><p>“She sure as hell had you pegged,” she said, and her mouth twitched when he laughed.. “I think I’d like to meet her.”</p><p>“Mary Ann? You’d hate each other,” he said, even though he was pretty sure they’d get on scarily well.</p><p>“Anyway, I meant… You know when to leave things the fuck alone. And you don’t ask more of me than I can give.”</p><p>“That’s a good thing?”</p><p>“These days it is. Some of us aren’t ready to stop running yet.”</p><p>Unease shivered down his spine. “Claire...”</p><p>“It’s okay.” She rose up, bringing her lips to his. She kissed him with feeling, “Seriously.”</p><p>“Stop pushing?”</p><p>There was a moment when he thought she was going to say something, a truth pressing at the inside of her eyes, the way his truth about Harlan must have done. Then she looked away. When she smiled, it was genuine, if a little sad. “Stop pushing.”</p><p>He hesitated. “If you ever change your mind...”</p><p>“And you call yourself selfish.”</p><p>“And shallow,” he said, cupping her breast, and she laughed. “You know I’m...”</p><p>“Yeah. Just...”</p><p>“Not yet?”</p><p>“Not yet. Soon maybe.” Non-committal, but that was okay. So long as she knew.</p><p>Ray fumbled over the side of the bed to retrieve the covers and drew them back onto the bed. She settled into the crook of his arm, resting her head against his shoulder, the warmth of her body stretched out against his. His eyelids slid closed, flicked open, slid closed again, heavy with the weight of encroaching sleep. Her breathing had already settled into an even rhythm.</p><p>He hadn’t really expected that telling her about Harlan would help, hadn’t really imagined her reacting in any way other than horror and anger. He hadn’t expected to feel like a burden had been lightened either, but he kind of did.</p><p>He couldn’t remember the last time he’d gone to sleep without the sharp edge of fear that they’d come for him in the night, but right now that fear seemed like a distant memory. It was a weird feeling. Unnerving, but welcome all the same. Such a little thing, but it felt like the world.</p><p> </p>
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